So was the President involved in Fast and Furious … or is he lying (a point missed by the cartoonist)? Executive privilege invocation is there to protect conversations between the President and his advisers. So either he was involved and is invoking this correctly (which in turn is not such a good thing) or he’s dishonestly invoking the privilege.

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4.So was the President involved in Fast and Furious … or is he lying (a point missed by the cartoonist)? Executive privilege invocation is there to protect conversations between the President and his advisers.

Actually I believe the privilege being asserted is ‘deliberative privilege’ which applies to how members of the executive branch discuss how to reply to questions from the other branches.

Needless to say, you’re analysis of Executive Privilege seems misinformed as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_privilege seems to say that it applies to the entire Executive Branch, not just to conversations where the President himself was directly a party.

Well as we can see you are wrong, Executive Privilege never meant *just* conversations the President himself has. It does however include policy debate, internal disagreement on the President’s team and so on. It doesn’t include actual Excutive actions.

This would make the line rather fuzzy. For example, Bush would probably have been justified in invoking it to keep Congress from questioning which cabinate officers were opposed to the Iraq war. The leaking of Plume’s status as a CIA agent, though, gets fuzzy. Was it a purposeful act of the executive to discredit her husband? Then privilege wouldn’t apply. Was it an authorized act by an executive member acting on his own? Then it wouldn’t apply. What if there was discussion among executive branch officials about using the wife’s status as retailiation against the husband? Then it might apply.

An odd statement for a guy defending various Obama Whitehouse leaks for political gain.

By changing the subject you admit defeat.

Seems to me that your criteria is magic. You can’t know if the criteria applies unless they are released.

That’s not really very magical. How much can you say about a document that you can’t read yourself? That’s why in these cases a solution is sometimes to let a trusted 3rd party like a retired AG or judge review the materials and decide himself what would fall under EP and what wouldn’t.